[Gathering ideas] Let's add a view (or multiple) for camera trap data 🌴📸🐒

[rudokemper]

Some of our users are starting to collect camera trap data, consisting of a media file (image / video) and tabular metadata (such as location and site name).

I would like to invite some preliminary thoughts on how to visualize these on guardianconnector-views. This would be for exploration or visualization of data alone - we are not considering deriving any scientific or analytical insights about camera trap data at this time.

I can imagine that our users might like to explore this data via a Gallery and Map template - see the repo readme for screenshot examples of these existing view templates. (And you can view these on the BCM demo deployment, if you have access.)

However, are there any specific features that would be helpful to build in to these templates for camera traps? Are there other ways of exploring camera trap data that are different from these Gallery and Map templates?

For example, what comes to my mind is that we could...

• Visualize data on a map as a heatmap layer.
• Allow the user to filter the data by timestamp.
• Instead of just one column filter (the status quo), offer multiple filtering options - e.g. by site name, species, date, ...
• Add a checkbox filter for "Favorite" (e.g. the checkbox option that was added in Suriname for Timestamp)

Would love your ideas @abfleishman @IamJeffG @mmckown and anyone else!

[abfleishman]

I started to respond here and got a little brainstormy. I think it would be helpful to brainstorm in a group. With that said below is the beginning of my aborted attempt to respond....

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I have to constantly remind myself this is not a tool/method to label data. This is 100% a method to display ALREADY labeled data. So this means that the user does not need to be able to add any info while looking at photos. It is purely a tool to display information already generated and imported into some centralized database.

To me the map component is less interesting until there are lots of locations. Camera trap (and acoustic) dataset are often made up of 1000s of media files from each site. So this makes it more challenging to map in a meaningful way, beyond simply markers (e.g. the heat map idea might not work until there are 100s or 1000s of locations that have been monitored. It also strays into the realm of science and might be wise to avoid in the near future because if you are trying to map animals you need to have an appropriate survey design + sampling execution. Anyway, not the point here).

I think a map with markers that on click pulls the "metadata" about the site/deployments at that site (and maybe a species list and number of images with that species. Then link to filterable gallery of images. Filtering the gallery on any combos of data fields seems important. I could see a few different pages to start.

• The map -> brings you to the gallery filtered for the site clicked.
• A gallery that shows one image per species (click on the image and brings you to all the images of that species we a map for just that species).
• A map ability to filter using a polygon to select points + data fields? -> gallery

I am going to stop here. I think I might have missed the point and now I am just wandering through my messy thoughts.

[rudokemper]

All makes sense to me, @abfleishman. Thanks for your thoughts!

With some caution, I want to note that we could make it possible to add / edit labels. On the change detection side, we are hearing from our partners that it will be useful for them to add metadata about alerts and do things like relate alerts (and Mapeo data) together. So we could also add a POST endpoint for camera traps to add / update data. But I'm quite sure we'd be missing a significant amount of functionality from Timelapse or other tools that facilitate the labeling process, and we shouldn't aim to reinvent the wheel here. This CT view should remain a light touch option for basic visualization.